Blogcritics Author: Jayson Harsin

Concert Review: Eli Paperboy Reed, Paris 7/15/08

Jayson Harsin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:50:02 EDT

Eli Paperboy Reed, the hottest new Soul Revivalist, performs his first show in Paris
Eli Paperboy Reed, the sensational 24-year old Soul Man from Boston the whole internet is buzzing about, made his first appearance in Paris last night at La Maroquinerie. His voice, his look, his supporting band, his stage routine--all lived up to the hype. Reed was pushing his fabulous new record Roll With You. Last night his perfectly pickled...

Concert Review: The Hives & Gogol Bordello - Le Zenith - Paris, France - April 20, 2008

Jayson Harsin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:32:52 EDT

Gogol Bordello and the Hives's shock therapy for Paris.
Gogol Bordello and the Hives: an amphetamine freak’s dream bill. The two bands did indeed live up to the hype about their energy before a large crowd at Paris’s Zenith Sunday night. But the show left me pondering the incredible difference between live shows and recordings. Gogol Bordello are special. Their slogan is cleverly diffusible...

Concert Review: Thed� - La Maroquinerie, Paris, France December 4, 2007

Jayson Harsin — Wed, 5 Dec 2007 10:08:22 EST

Concert Review of thed�, a buzzing new franco-finnish indie folk duo at the Maroquinerie, Paris.
It’s worth repeating that the best live concerts are often impressive visually as well as musically. This is certainly the case with the Franco-Finnish trio thedø, who played to a sold out audience at Paris’s La Maroquinerie club last night. Thedø is actually a duo (Finnish Olivia B Merjlahti and French Dan...

Wombat Rock: Interview with The Wombats

Jayson Harsin — Sun, 4 Nov 2007 18:17:50 EST

�We want to keep on doing music full time. We don�t want to be a flash in the pan.�
They’re from the U.K., not Australia, these Wombats. In fact, U.K. fans and critics are going so wild over this trio’s eclectic brand of what I call Indie Doo Wop that their Liverpudlian origins have encouraged comparisons to their legendary local forbears, The Beatles. There are seven letters in the bands’ names and they both...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Concert Review: 54 Nude Honeys/Rodeo Massacre: La Maroquinerie, Paris

Jayson Harsin — Sun, 20 May 2007 15:15:56 EDT

I have a bet, bookies. I’m sure this article, this little ditty about a concert in the city of burned out lights, will get me more hits than anything I’ve ever written anywhere before. You know why. And sorry fellas. You came to the wrong place. I have a second bet for the music lovers who made it past the title. If a garage rock band, especially one singing in a non-English tongue (kudos to those resisting the imperial forces, in league with Chewy, Han, and Luke), has the savoir-faire to brand themselves as racy and then puts on a spectacular visual show, it doesn’t really matter if anyone knows the lyrics — or any song differentiation at all, for that matter. In case you’re wondering, that’s a compliment. And in case you’re wondering, I’m talkin’ ‘bout 54 Nude Honeys, the Japanese "dirty rockers" (garage punk) who (dis-)graced the stage of La Maroquinerie in Paris last night. It wouldn’t be fair to continue with the Nude Honeys without saying something about the impressive opening act, Rodeo Massacre. As you know, sometimes the opening act is utterly missable. One often finds only about one-quarter of the main act audience even deigning to pull their little ostrich heads out of the sand for it. It’s significant that Rodeo Massacre played to a full house. This is a band to watch. The charismatic lead singer Isabel Lindqwister is a gospel choir bird and a jazz dive diva from Stockholm. The band is a Stockholm-Paris musical commute. It’s not really garage. It’s not blues. It’s a great postmodern pastiche that is clearly influenced by the mods. Lindqwister, a Swede in Paris, has a bluesy soulful voice that recalls Kelly Hogan and The Detroit Cobras in contemporary indie settings. Like the main act that followed her, Linqwister’s stage presence competes with her extraordinary vocals. Her straight blonde bangs into the eyes and mane descending to the derriere give her an unforgettable magnetism as she grooves around the stage as if at mod revival party. Rodeo Massacre was a fantastic prelude to the spectacular 54 Nude Honeys. The Nude Honeys (named from the deck of playing cards popular with American forces in WW II) bring me back to my original hypothesis about garage and spectacle. I don’t’ speak Japanese. No matter. Lead singer Yuri could’ve been screeching, “Give me your money, idiot!” and I would’ve never known the difference. The Nude Honeys gave the mostly male audience exactly what they wanted: high energy, surf-tinged garage-punk and dominatrix theatrics. Darkness is to Honeys as Kryptonite is to Superman. You have to see them to love them. Judging from the roaring crowd, some of it exploding in to an impressively post-teenage mosh pit, the Honeys belong to an audio-visual genre that bends the borders of rock, theater, the gentleman’s club, and the musical. They also follow in the tradition of theatrical dirty rockers like The Plasmatics, G.G. Allin, The Stooges, and The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Their all latex attire is poached from the legendary punk fashionistas on King’s Road circa ’76. Chanteuse Yuri’s bikini provocatively shoots up the mercury as she shakes her fists violently at the ceiling, pouncing about, and screaming in a voice and antics that recall a deluded yappy schnauzer picking fights with Doberman Pinschers. Her range is not impressive, but war cries and transitory ululating is real brand differentiation. Just as Rodeo Massacre is about Linqwister, so the Honeys are about front(al)-lady Yuri. The bassist and guitarist, did little to draw attention beyond their admittedly sultry attire. A smile here and there. A tough SnM presence handling the prominently long-necked guitars—but with more stationary and muted gestures by comparison to their singer. The drummer, the lone guy in the group about whom the male audience no doubt fantasizes for his intimate surroundings on this “Sexy Pistols Tour,” is the second most prominent figure. Relegated like all drummers to the dustbin of the stage, he nevertheless refuses that anonymity with wild movements and a sopping wet chest. Picture Animal from the Muppets, but wet, Japanese, shirtless, and in latex pants. It’s true that the sound does matter. No one moshes to Simon and Garfunkel or Air. But this is definitely a band to watch.

An educator, scholar and critic, Jayson Harsin also was recently an indie rock and alt. country dj for seven years at WNUR radio in Chicago. He has two blogs (Pearls Before Swine and Parisnormale:Indie Paris Music News).

Sarkozy Triumphs in Struggle to Claim France

Jayson Harsin — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:45:14 EDT

"I am France," the Sun King, Louis XIV, famously said. Several candidates in an unprecedented Sun King-Reaganesque style struggled to claim consubstantiation with the nation last Sunday in a showing of what winner Nikolas Sarkozy and others called a victory for democracy. The poll projections for the first round of the French presidential election have been crunched and, unlike the last election (in 2002), when Jean-Marie Le Pen freaked out the world by showing that a neo-fascist could win 17% of the vote, this time there were few surprises. Uh-huh, this time the savvy right-of-center Nikolas Sarkozy (of the Union Mouvement Populaire party) headed the pack with over 30 % of the vote, showing how a right-of-center candidate can poach the slogans of the extreme wing of his ideological sphere (as the Republicans in the U.S. have done so well at least since Nixon began the Southern strategy), speak in code about race, and try to scare or seduce undecided centrists into voting for him on hot button issues--especially Islamophia coded as immigration, law and order, and the candidacy of Turkey to enter the EU. The Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal received just over 25% of the vote, placing her in the second and final run-off for the French presidency in early May. Francois Bayrou, the self-appointed bridge of right and left, ended up with a strong but still inadequate showing of almost 19%, while the right-wing surprise of 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, garnered just over 10% this time (largely because Sarkozy stole his fire).The ministry of the interior at noon Sunday reported a record turnout thus far with over 30% already recorded. By eight Sunday evening news organizations reported it was, in fact, a record turnout in French electoral history with 85.5% of eligible voters heading to the polls.Here's what it looked like when you slice the French block of voting cheese into 12 qualifying pieces.SARKOZY Nicolas : 31.09%ROYAL Ségolène : 25.78%BAYROU François : 18.53%LE PEN Jean-Marie : 10.55%BESANCENOT Olivier : 4.12%DE VILLIERS Philippe : 2.25%BUFFET Marie-George : 1.94%VOYNET Dominique : 1.57%LAGUILLER Arlette : 1.34%BOVÉ José : 1.32%NIHOUS Frédéric : 1.17%Source: France2 TV The major issues were said to be government corruption, the economy, and crime/security/immigration. Aside from government corruption, these issues are heavily racially coded. And yet none of these candidates made any honest attempt to deal with the open wound of race in a France plagued with a post-colonial identity crisis. Au contraire, they appealed to nationalism in a way hitherto only reserved for the extreme right, residual supporters of Tyrannosaurus De Gaulle, and 30s fascists whose necks were spared after World War II (such as Le Pen).It’s not clear how many people base their vote on posters, TV blurbs, books, internet sites, and influence from local opinion leaders and/or friends. But scholars tell us we’re living in a time of short attention spans and political campaign games that are more about catchy slogans and image than about policy debate.It’s interesting to note, then, that the form of consciousness-raising the majority of people in France most encounter is the political poster. These things are all over Paris: on official city-designated campaign displays, in the metro, on mailboxes and utility stands, and especially on construction barriers near road or sidewalk work. Remember that the Paris region, the city, and its suburbs, are home to over nine million people. Let’s take a look at the slogans and images they have been bombarded with. While leading candidate Sarkozy has chanted “law and order” and “respect for the Republic” incessantly since he became Minister of the Interior in 2002, his 2007 campaign poster and slogan doesn’t seem to draw attention to the fear and division on which he has built his identity. With a nearly obscene irony for his opponents, his poster reads, “Together everything becomes possible.” (Ensemble tout devient possible). Of course, his critics say, that is precisely the problem. To them, the seduction of a majority of citizens is a softer fascism, harder to detect without the violent gesticulations, and oral paroxysms of the 1930s political style. In some areas of Paris Sarkozy’s posters have been de-faced, literally, with the notorious Hitler mustache (as in the one above). On the other hand, the far left candidate Olivier Besancenot’s brand is “Our lives are worth more than their profits,” while the Green candidate calls for an “Ecological Revolution,” whatever that would mean. But none of them mentions any clear policy initiatives, except for the old-school “Worker’s Fight” Party and its candidate Arlette Laguiller (in yellow above). Her poster’s outline of detailed positions seems to be completely ignorant of or outright rejects the common wisdom of the Power Point Generation. The anti-Sarkozy skull and crossbones poster has a fair amount of text with it, though it’s not much about policy as about the doomsday civil war that will follow should Sarko be elected. In other words, it’s all branding where the function of the product has nothing to do with the ad and its appeals to patriotism mainly, and human value/class inequality and exploitation on the far left. That is the genre of the poster. The problem is that it’s also the genre of the campaign ad on TV, and in some newspapers, which many people will not read any way. Segolene Royal has tried to combat Sarko’s strategies to claim justice and patriotism by herself claiming them. Her slogan is “La France Presidente” ("France (for) President" and “Plus juste la France sera plus forte" ("A Juster France will be a Stronger France."). Her posters are usually blue and white with some red lettering. She encouraged audiences to join her in singing the French national anthem and to buy themselves a French flag to proudly wave. Francois Bayrou, the candidate who claimed he would unite right and left, branded himself “La France de toutes nos forces” (“With All Our Strength for France”). All of these suggest that France is some how divided and weak. And it has mostly been poached from the far Right, about which Jean Marie Le Pen, its 79-year old outspoken and enduring figure has at times vigorously complained. His slogans have long been "Défendre les Français avec les Français" and "La France et les Français d'abord" ("Defend France for the French" and "France and the French First of All). Phillipe De Villiers, candidate of the far right “Mouvement Pour la France” (Movement for France) has similarly claimed the slogan “La Fierte’ d’etre Francais” (“The Pride of Being French”). Le Pen and Phillipe De Villier’s anti-immigrant and pro-nationalist rhetoric has now become mainstream. So, the people have spoken in round one, as Sarkozy gleefully pointed out last Sunday evening. But exactly what they said and why is work for an interpreter. Rest assured that Sarkozy and Royal will both cheerfully rush in to that role and assist us.

Sarkozy's French "Law and Order": Racing for the French Presidency

Jayson Harsin — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 06:38:06 EDT

What lies beneath the "victory for democracy" evidenced in the record voter turnouts for the French presidential election last Sunday? Some say a new kind of crypto-fascism and a resurgent populism based on glossy, strategically ambiguous political branding. But American readers will recall: this is laregly at the hands--er, mouth--of Nikolas Sarkozy, a man whose smooth politicking has been described as "American," of which he claims to be quite proud.When one gets past their strategically ambiguous but patriotic slogans I discussed in an earlier article on BC is the policy program obvious? You have to go to his website for starters. There you find that Sarkozy claims 15 points. Put an end to Public Weakness/Impotence (strong government, willing to act and take responsibility)An irreproachable Democracy (speaking to the theme of corruption that has haunted Chirac and the Clearstream affair).Conquer unemployment.Rehabilitate Work (Sarko claims the 35 hour work week, installed by the socialists has resulted in a culture where people don’t have “a taste for risk” and work has become devalued.).Increase Buying Power (which means there shouldn’t be laws limiting the amount of time one wants to work).Europe must protect itself from globalization (fine print: preserve the “values of civilization” and thus oppose Turkey ’s entry into the EU).Respond to the urgency of Sustainable DevelopmentAllow All the French to be homeowners. Spread the principles of authority, respect and merit. (Know your place! Don’t talk back! No rioting.).Schools that guarantee the success of all students (Of course, the problem with schools currently is an authority problem).Make higher education and research at a globally competitive level. Rid “difficult neighborhoods” of violence.Take control of Immigration. Major political efforts Proud to be French (apologies to the Far Right).Segolene Royal offered a short program for the majority of Attention Deficients and for the professional citizens a 100 point program. The seven-pointer she calls “7 Pillars.”Re-launch growth so everyone can work. (Sounds good--how? Her predecessors argued that limiting the hours of the work week would help it, and besides, what kind of growth seems to be increasingly important under the threat of global warming and the twilight of the throwaway society) Improve buying power. (Noble aim)Promote education. (That's seriously a "pillar?")Guarantee the social protection of families. (Fine, and what exactly does that mean?)Realize Environmental Excellence. (Again: great! But how is the question)Struggle Against All Forms of Violence (at least here she clearly acknowledges that teenagers burning cars in the suburbs is not the only form of violence in France ).Act for a Stronger France . (Um, whatever that means. I suppose this is to counter any accusation that she is "weak" on anything at all). Both of these plans have hyperlinks to deeper explanations. But most people are probably not likely to have time or patience to go that far (the important qualification to utopian cheerleading about the internet as the revival of alt.news and robust democracy). On the surface these can each be deceptively ambiguous and even look similar on a few points.Again, this is hardly different from glittering generalities shoveled to the American public for some time now during campaigns and in between them. And patently American are many of the strategies: playing to extreme wings of a party and undecideds with code and ambiguous claims whose conclusions anyone can supply; also having something to reel in every other single-issue citizen or group in an era where political parties are increasingly weaker with large groups of undecideds.Last Sunday night, Sarkozy spoke to a roaring crowd of admirers, claiming that the high rate of participation was a victory for democracy and that he and Madame Royal have a responsibility to conduct a debate with sincerity and dignity, a true debate of ideas. Cleverly, Sarkozy framed the election results around a great showdown (reverberating with other dramatic claims of other great clashes between civilizations) between two competing ideas of nation, politics, and values.Sarko has made "law and Order," authority, economy, and the family the keystones of his campaign and political image. In a speech in the southwestern city of Perpignan in late February he fashioned himself in opposition to the socialist legacy of 1968, reduced to its alleged disrespect for authority. “Down with authority! That was the platform of 1968!” he cried. According to him, lack of respect for authority is responsible for children’s disobedience to their parents and teachers; to the law; to the police; to the flag; to the nation.At times, he rails against what he alleges are residual doctrines of the post-68 left, and at others he ascribes causality for social instability, criminality, and violence to socialist economic policies—that is, no work is producing delinquents, an argument that allows him to argue for cutting taxes by 4%, exempting more people from an inheritance tax, cutting civil service costs, cracking down on illegal immigration, and cracking down on crime with minimum sentences for repeat offenders and more severe punishments for juveniles. At still other times, he suggests that Islam and its values of polygamy are responsible for single-parent households with no father figure to discipline children, the latter who become active in underground drug economies and theft.Sarko’s law and order, family values, and security rhetoric is in some ways a bit of bad American political breath blown into contemporary post-colonial French culture and politics. Like conservative American presidential contenders George Wallace and then Nixon in 1968 who reacted to consecutive summers of African-American riots during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency by dividing white voters with code words for race alarm such as "states rights" and “law and order,” Sarkozy’s codes of “law and order,” “respect,” “youth,” and “authority” and “crime” play to fears of many white French citizens who gave racist Jean-Marie Le Pen the second place vote in the first round of the Presidential election of 2002 with nearly 17% of the vote.There has been talk that Sarkozy has also tried to soften his image in the last two or three months. But on his last day of official campaigning, he spoke to an audience in Marseille, claiming he would be France ’s “protector” and calling for renewed faith in a France that has been victim of self-doubt recently. "I hate this fashion for repentance that says France hates itself and its history," he said. Almost perversely to an American observer, he appropriated the form and words of Martin Luther King, repeating “I have a dream,” but the dream is about demanding respect for authority all the while shirking any hard discussion of race. He went on to claim that while colonialism was perhaps “an unfair system,” there is a debt owed to those “decent and hardworking French families” who were driven out of Africa (in the movements for independence, such as the Algerian War). He refused to apologize for that “system.”In fact, he has in the campaign dealt with the racial problems issuing from colonialism and the French national identity crisis in the same way he did in the midst of the 2005 riots. He completely de-historicized them and treated their causes as cultural (bad parenting, not respecting true French culture, i.e. non-Muslim), economic (being lazy or active in an illicit drug economy), and pathological (bad eggs are bad eggs; put them away for good), suggesting cultural solutions (respect) to the problems he defined so facilely. Thus he avoided the well-documented problems of race in everyday French life—in housing, schooling, job hiring, political and media representation, and general social life. Many white French people don’t want to live, work, go to school, or hang out with African-French, which in practice becomes a race problem. But that is precisely what can not be talked about in Sarkozy’s discourse. For what it’s worth, Royal is happy to tiptoe around it too, with her own codes like “A more just France is a stronger France.”Sarkozy has cleverly if not diabolically claimed solidarity and the nation for himself by identifying as non-patriotic those who talk of particular identities instead of France as a whole, those who criticize France ’s past, its values, and traditions. In fact, he claims they threaten “our capacity to live together!” Obviously, his attacks on multiculturalism and his calls for a unified and proud France belie the fact that millions of Arab and black French citizens are systematically excluded from the “big tent” France that Sarkozy carries on about in complete mauvaise foi. He tries to set up a farcical debate where his opponents are on the defensive. They can’t talk about racism, difference, and inequalities based therein and their historical origins because that is un-patriotic from the get-go.There is clear anxiety over national division evident in campaign slogans that ask citizens to practice togetherness ("ensemble tout devient possible"--Sarkozy) and strive for a "fairer France [that]is a stronger France" ("“Plus juste la France sera plus forte"). But the blindspot for those many obsessed with France's identity crisis as it negotiates cultural and economic globalization on the one hand, and the reality of a changing ethnic national landscape on the other, is the fact that post-revolutionary French national identity was founded on difference from the other, the less civilized which "the real French" could always enjoy solidarity in subordinating through the colonial project. Now the former subordinates are French citizens, but their cultural difference is threatening. Until white France and its political leaders launch a serious dialogue about race and the unfinished business of colonialism, new riots will emerge, their flames perhaps touching more than the banlieue (urban periphery inhabited by large numbers of North Africans). And "law and order" talk and action will hardly extinguish them; au contraire, it will fan them higher and farther.

Kirk Rundstrom, 1968-2007: Thank you

Jayson Harsin — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:14:25 EDT

Like a lot of people in this world, I have a million things I’m supposed to be doing today. But it’s gray again in Paris, my beautiful old dog is an old dog, I’m sitting in a room full of furniture that’s been sold on-line as a major symbolic step in a harrowing divorce process, and it’s Sunday. That there are other puppies that will be born, that people can fall in love again — it all just makes me sadder; seems more right if they could not. But most of all, I can’t justify going one more goddamned day without talking about Kirk Rundstrom. New puppies and loves? Maybe. Another Kirk Rundstrom? No way.Kirk Rundstrom of the ever-beloved insurgent country groups Split Lip Rayfield and Scroat Belly was taken by cancer on February 22. I’m disgusted with myself for having deferred my memorial ‘til now. His passing has had a considerable impact on me, and it's not only because we were the same age.I first saw Kirk playing with Scroat Belly in Lawrence, Ks some time in 1995. Though I’m not precise on the date, I’ll never forget the impression that Kirk left on me. One word comes to mind: energy. The man was Shazzam on guitar. He beamed (smiled right back at the Grim Reaper, I’d bet), he rocked, and yet tattooed, work-booted and capped by farm feed suppliers, the man never played the cocky rocker. When you watched him shred that acoustic (or electrified acoustic) guitar you witnessed an electrical storm on guitar strings. He and his comrades would play until they either couldn’t physically play any more or the club owner pulled the plug, as Kirk looked out disappointedly from a small pond of sweat he had generated over the last two hours of giving everything he had to an audience. He loved to share his energy. He forgave us our faults and welcomed us asking nothing in return save for our attention. Were Jesus to return as an alt.country rocker, Kirk Rundstrom would be an obvious form for him to take — what? You didn’t read that sermon: “Will preach for beer?”After that first kiss, I henceforth slept with only one eye shut, the other ever looking for a new Scroat Belly or Split Lip Rayfield — in a word: Rundstrom — show to be announced, which I could not possibly miss, I said to myself and not overstating the matter all that much. I moved to Chicago in 1997 but had the good fortune of seeing Rundstrom perform often there, Chicago being the headquarters of Bloodshot Records, which boasted Rundstrom's bands on their impressive roster.Like others, I was never ever disappointed by a Kirk Rundstrom performance. I never felt ripped off, as if by one of these bands who appear to prefer playing to a wall and who are more than happy to be off stage in 30 minutes and no encore, no matter how much you paid for a ticket. On the contrary, Kirk would encore until the cows came home, and then some more.In the late '90s I had the opportunity to meet the man personally when he came to Chicago, generously appearing with his band mates to record live for the alt. and classic country show on Chicago’s WNUR radio station, “Southbound Train,” which I hosted with Keith Cook. Not only was Kirk a fine musician and performer; he was also a fine human being by all standards. Talented, friendly, generous, an un-pretentious bon vivant who loved his beer, American gothic, and barbeque. His big tattooed forearms gave him the air of a scrappy farmer, even a man who had had his share of winning bar fights — until you saw that smile of his. There was nothing macho about it. He seemed to bridge waters, peoples, styles, classes, regions.As others have also remarked, it is unsurprising that he would with his bandmates bridge what had seemed naturally gulfed audiences and styles of music: bluegrass, speed metal, punk, and hippy jam bands. There were elements of each in his music, his style, his way of being. Perhaps others had tried: they had failed where he succeeded, even if not enough people have been able to appreciate his talent for this bridging and hybridity."You put electricity and drums behind us and we're a rock band," he said in a well-circulated quote. "We play bluegrass instruments, but we don't do covers. We don't wear rouge or bolo ties. I don't know any traditionals. I couldn't play a flat-pickin' song to save my life. I'm a hack of a guitar player. Eric may be one of the best guitar players I've heard, but we forced him to play banjo. I don't know what Wayne is doing. He's just shredding his mandolin. I wouldn't even want to be associated with the state of bluegrass today. It's lounge music."This approach to music made Scroat Belly’s one and only album on Bloodshot Records, Daddy’s Farm a cult classic. Each song seemed to be a tempest of twang, loud, hard and fast, preceded by a more traditional lull and followed by the same. There was always something rough and not really ironic about Kirk’s and Wayne’s vocals in the slower parts of the songs which kept them from sounding like straight duplicates or caricatures of a Louvin Brothers or Bill Monroe number; and always something twangy in voice, style and arrangement that kept them from ever being confused with Metallica or Agent Orange imitators.An acoustic version of Scroat Belly (on some songs at least) lived on in Split Lip Rayfield also on Bloodshot, which produced a number of impressive albums in this unique genre, my favorite of which is perhaps the first and eponymous album in 1998. With Kirk, Eric Mardis joined on banjo, while Jeff Eaton strapped a lone cat-gut string to a truck fuel tank and bloodied his duct-taped hands on bass; Scroat Belly’s Wayne Gottstine returned later to “shred,” as Kirk said, a mandolin in the mix. Can you start to imagine what this looked like live, had you never tasted the sweet nectar of a Split Lip show? The syncopated beats and minor chords of “Outlaw” and barnburner; the auctioneer-ish vocals and sped up, even if often rudimentary, picking of “Long Haul Weekend”; a kind of truck-stop poetry to numbers like “Pinball Machine”; a necessary simplicity and celebrated naiveté of “Sunshine”; a vaguely Balkans-like pace and punchiness to some of them — they stuck with you all day and commanded your return to them, a command that has me often returning to this album almost ten years later.Unlike with Heehaw and some of its alt.country descendants, it was never completely clear to what degree Split Lip/Scroat Belly embraced and lived the country motifs and clichés they rearranged, added to, and played with, which was probably a good thing. This complex relationship with the rural, the land, and its culture (like Faulkner’s with the South!) also emerged in their DIY streak, such as t-shirts they made with the montage of a well-nourished hog in silhouette, the name Split Rip Rayfield and the text “100% pure fat.” Funny, ironic, knowingly embracing what the mainstream South Beach Dieters feared in food, culture, music? Who knows? But it was good. My ex and I shared a lot of wonderful things together, perhaps the most powerful and satisfying being music, especially live music. For us, going to their shows was like the revivifying trip to the spa that our bourgeois counterparts swear is indispensable for getting out of bed in the morning and continuing this often perplexing daily cycle. From SxSW 1998 to various gigs in Chicago and Lawrence through 2004, we would leave Kirk’s shows re-charged, beaming, Kirk’s smile as contagious as the music he played. If I could change one of the many things I don’t like about myself, it might very well be to take Kirk’s smile and use it like an Evil Eye. It seemed to offer asylum and to ward off bad luck, even if its limit was death.Kirk’s (his bands’) recordings of course must lack that visual zest. Yet, more than a little strangely, you can hear without much effort and concentration that missing sense. The sound evokes the image. Kirk was and will continue to be a spirit. You listen and you can see him behind those lifeless speakers and that grim faux-metallic stereo, his playful bulging eyes and unquenchable smile refusing to fade — ever. So thank God for recorded music, and despite Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, thank God for memory: Kirk’s spirit, his smile, lives on, and God knows I, like others, need it. Thank you, Kirk. You will not soon be forgotten.Tribute to Kirk Rundstrom

Music Review: Scott H. Biram - Graveyard Shift

Jayson Harsin — Wed, 7 Mar 2007 18:31:52 EST

Scott H. Biram’s Graveyard Shift is certainly one of the best among the many fine albums Bloodshot Records has put out over the years. Biram’s wild country-blues-punk whirls fast and dirty like a Texas Tornado in your ears, full of the sound and the fury. On some songs Biram partly reminds me of the stripped down garagey blues rock the Flat Duo Jets once mastered. But then Biram adds a fuzzy-gospel rhythm and response-vocals to his own un-gargled calls sung through an antique microphone. He even experiments with a death metal hybrid on “Church Babies,” which while interesting in terms of the album’s breadth and a kind of expressionism at which Biram excels, is a sound that really pushes my threshold of music tolerance. But one marvels at his barely controlled one-man-band energy a la Hasil Adkins, which is legendary live, but even comes through on the recording. On the other hand, a number of slower numbers figure in the bag, almost all prodded along by a strong acoustic guitar and a stomping left foot (he has amplified a “stomping board” as his percussion section). Witness “Been Down too Long.” This ditty injects gospel into the blues punk mix. And Biram’s sound has a distinctive rural devotion about it. Bibles are a motif running through many of his songs. Witness again “Lost Case of Being Found,” which of course plays on the biblical parable of the “prodigal son,” who after leaving the family farm and passing a fair amount of time whoring and doping comes home and finds the Lord. This one is followed by “Only Jesus (gonna set you free).” George Jones’s “Please, Jesus, Please Take the Devil Out of Me,” haunts that one, which travels at about the same tempo, but like most of his songs, has an acoustic guitar driving the vocals along. His influences range from chain gang recordings to Bill Monroe and various punk.Biram’s subjects come from the underbelly of rural America, where whiskey, Jesus, hard work, and heartache are common bedfellows. Documenting that world, Biram sounds like insurgent country’s William Faulkner. This Kingsbury, TX, native is hardly another recovering punk rocker discovering creative opportunity in twang. Nor is he a whiney indie singer-songwriter or pretentious college-educated indie rocker from the suburbs (which I admit to liking equally well, and even though Biram has been to college). He’s the real deal. He’s the American work ethic. He’s punk DIY. He does his own artwork for his albums, the first three of which are self-released, makes his own fan t-shirts, and so forth. Biram's style belches the heartland. Yet this sound is likely often too radical for that very heartland (like Jesus himself!), as is the majority of insurgent country that Bloodshot Records boldly unleashes on the many mostly urban ears who hear it creeping into the frayed edges of their indie scenes. Make no mistake; this guy has been to hell and back and has earned the right to climb on stage, preach and rock. We’re talking about a guy who in spring 2003 collided head on with an 18-wheeler on a highway near San Antonio. Result: broken legs, crushed foot, and a broken arm. Yet, six weeks later he wheeled himself into Austin’s prestigious Continental Club and started stomping away, still attached to an IV. This guy is scrappy, and he brings a kind of ambiguously playful punk combativeness to his shows, recalling the spitting contests the Sex Pistols used to have with their audiences. Not really a surprise: Biram has done his punk time, too. Finally, when a Pitchforkmedia.com reviewer gave him his only scathing review, Biram wrote back inrefutation, which can be found circulating around the internet. Like Hasil Adkins to whom he’s sometimes compared, the stories that surround Biram start to give the guy a bit of a lunatic-demigod streak. But hey, that’s interesting to us more predictable folks, and is why we read Faulkner and Bukowski, and watch Oz, The Sopranos, Ken Loach, and Larry Clark films. Guess what, Sunshine? The world is also a dirty stinking mess. But I reckon it’s an unquestionable pleasure seeing artists who are bent on showing us the dirty, ugly things in the most fascinating and even strangely pretty ways. Biram does that dirty deed with nearly unparalleled flair.

Universal Health Care: The Problems with Public Opinion Polls, Part I

Jayson Harsin — Tue, 6 Mar 2007 14:01:52 EST

In “top Yahoo news stories” this past week, a Reuters' wire article announced a poll just found that health care is the "top domestic concern" of a majority of Americans (Iraq being the top overall concern). This article is an example of serious problems with public opinion produced through polls, and its representation in the news. First of all, the trouble with this Yahoo/Reuters article is the same a lot of news suffers from: lack of context. We need to know the history of this issue to understand whether this is a new concern, which many readers will likely infer. If the issue's been around for a long time, then how would that be news? ‘Course it wouldn't be; it’d be "olds." And if we dig a little in the mainstream press and public opinion research, we find in fact that health care and Americans' interest in universal health care has been a big concern for a long time. A Harris poll in 2005 surveyed Americans on a range of health issues. It found that 75% of Americans "strongly favored" universal health care in the U.S. Interesting finding. However, the poll doesn't tell readers how Americans think it should be funded. Would Americans be willing to pay a bit higher income tax for this coverage? Questionable, given the popularity of tax breaks. Americans are notorious for having their cake and eating it too. A poll last year, for example, found that nearly 60% of Americans think the U.S.tax system is unfair.Going back further, what do you know? In October 2003, an ABC News/Washington Post poll “found that Americans prefer universal health care to the current health system by a margin of two to one. Even more revealing is the fact that Americans favor guaranteeing health insurance for all, ‘even if it means raising taxes.’” Indeed, some sources claim that Kaiser Foundation polls from 1992 to the present have shown majorities of Americans favoring universal health care for Americans or “health care guaranteed for all Americans,” but it’s not always clear what respondents understand by these terms. Questions that ask what is a "top concern" among a variety of issues handpicked by pollsters can also be misleading. No one asks, "Do you want your government to address your top concern only or several of your concerns?" So, first of all, the questions in public opinion studies can be skewed and misrepresent public opinion in its deeper sense, a public agenda, which would, in turn, supposedly influence a legislative agenda--how representatives are supposed to serve their constituents or be thrown out. Yet the way questions are asked and the way issues are presented in the news without giving a history of an issue and opinion about it, legislators are free to press on with pet issues that they may have put on the polling agenda in the first place (such as immigration, for instance). Nor do such questions about "opinion" often measure how well citizens understand opposing arguments on such issues. This is the problem with democracy by opinion polls. As the late Christopher Lasch pointed out, American democracy does not just need information; it also direly needs public debate and citizens capable of critically evaluating it.Indeed, opinions that have not passed through the filter of public debate and information-gathering was not the vision of the father of modern public opinion polling, George Gallup. In his Public Opinion in Democracy(1939), Gallup argued “the people, having heard the debate on both sides of every issue, can express their will” in public opinion polls. The result would be the nation as “one great room.” What we have today is more like a million different rooms, which hardly arrive at opinion through debate. Indeed, as I've shown, it's not always clear how opinion is formed and how strong it is on a personal political agenda. Is there another way? Stay tuned for Part II of the problems with public opinion.